IBM to accelerate adoption of blockchain and cognitive computing in Asia

Nurdianah Md Nur |
June 10, 2016

The tech giant will do so via The Watson Centre at Marina Bay, IBM Garage and the IBM Global Entrepreneur programme.

To help organisations in Asia leverage disruptive technologies to improve their business, IBM has announced its plans to assist in the rapid prototyping and commercialisation of solutions based on cognitive computing and blockchain.

To accelerate the adoption of cognitive computing, the company today (9 June 2016) opened The Watson Centre at Marina Bay, Singapore.

The centre is an incubator designed to bring together organisations, business partners and IBM experts to co-create business solutions that leverage IBM's cognitive, blockchain and design capabilities, according to IBM.

It will play host to Asia Pacific clients looking to use Watson technologies that reason, improve through learning, and discover insights hidden in large amounts of complex data.

For instance, Singapore's DBS Bank will work with the Watson Centre at Marina Bay to develop new use cases based on disruptive technologies, and to assist in its strategy to support FinTech startups in the region. Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS, said that the partnership "will help continue driving innovation within the bank, as well as assist in the acceleration and development of locally-generated Fintech innovations"

Parkway Pantai - an Asian integrated private healthcare group - is also planning to use Watson technologies to provide proactive patient monitoring and early intervention through real-time data analysis and notifications to nurses in anticipation of critical and life-threatening events."With decision support tools like Watson, our clinicians and nurses can get data in the right context, faster, and personalised to the patient's needs. This translates to greater efficiency and better outcomes for our patients," said Dr Kelvin Loh, Chief Executive Officer of Singapore Operations Division, Parkway Pantai.

The Watson Centre at Marina Bay will also act as a centre of expertise for almost 5,000 IBM cognitive solutions professionals in the Asia Pacific region alone, including researchers, IBM Watson specialists, data scientists, software engineers, agile developers and analytics experts.

Besides that, the centre will offer education, hackathons, and customised workshops for a broader ecosystem of innovators including software companies, startups, developers and systems integrators.

Encouraging blockchain adoptionIn terms of encouraging the use of blockchain, IBM will help accelerate the design, development and commercialisation of Singapore blockchain applications through the IBM Garage and the IBM Global Entrepreneur programme.

At the IBM Garage, experts collaborate with clients, developers and entrepreneurs to test-drive tools, processes, and procedures to make Blockchain real. The garage creates a bridge between the scale of enterprise and culture of startups and supports the development of an Open Standards based Blockchain ecosystem and creates new work opportunities in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the IBM Global Entrepreneur Programme helps startups and entrepreneurs who are building new generation of distributed ledger applications on the Blockchain harness the power of IBM Cloud, as well as connect and embed them into IBM's vast global network of enterprise clients, consultants and Innovation Centres to rapidly build, scale quickly and accelerate growth.